I'm a student getting ready to up sticks to University, but I do what I can .
I am running on a BT Infinity line, on a pretty weak BT Home Hub 5. Most of the network is ran from my bedroom, so my switch -a HP 2610 Gigabit 48 Port generously donated by my school- connects to the HH5 by a powerline adapter, who's speed I have forgotten. Connected to the switch is my PC, my Xbox (hardly used now I have finally joined the PCMR) and my Server. My Server is a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 with the G1610T Processor. It runs FreeNAS 9.3, and has 2 zdevs (One System Volume "SysVol" for the plugins, and one for storage "STORAGE" (RAID 0 Equiv.)) SysVol hosts no shares, whilst STORAGE has 2 datasets, with 1 share a piece, one for general storage, the other for file history images. Everything else is dealt with by the inbuilt WiFi on the HH5, which isn't awfully bad, just not jawdropping either...
Would I improve if I had the chance? Hell yes, there's so much more I want to do, including using a pfSense firewall and router solution, as well as using a more robust AP. But I need to be realistic; I'm moving to Student digs in 8 months, so a permanent solution really isn't worth setting up, and I'm not the wealthiest guy in the world (but I did manage to bag a part time job at my school as a Junior Network Tech ). Another issue is the BT HomeHub is an abosulte A*se to work with. We would change it, but there's better things to spend money on... This set up has helped me learn networking fundamentals, and has helped me explore production environments, an area I will be studying at university.